Wednesday, April 20, 2016

So when I read this gospel passage
earlier in the week, I imagined that I was listening to the NPR news quiz show,
“Wait … Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” How many of you are familiar with this show,
which airs on KUOW on Saturday mornings?

from flickr.com

I imagined that Peter Sagal was
welcoming a celebrity guest to the show, as he does each week to play the
portion of the show called “Not My Job.” The task is to quiz a known
personality on a topic not normally associated with his or her field of work. Now,
this is usually some B-level celebrity, with some notable exceptions in the
past, including Bill Clinton, whom Peter quizzed about “My
Little Pony.” (The former president got three out of three questions correct, by the way.)

But this week is extra special. This week, Peter Sagal has called
Jesus of Nazareth onto the show. So with apologies in advance to Peter Sagal
and to NPR (and maybe Jesus, too!) for taking their names in vain … welcome Jesus of Nazareth,
everybody! [applause]

Jesus: Thank you, Peter, thank you
for having me on your show.

Peter: Jesus, we’re so glad you
could join us today. In fact, we’re so honored to have you here that we’re
going to do things a little differently this time. We’re going to ask you to
pick our quiz topic. Honestly, we didn’t know what else to do. I mean, you’re
the Son of God, right? Is there anything you don’t know about? Is there
anything not normally associated with your field of work?

Jesus: Well, Peter, I guess you’ve
got a point. I am the second person of the Trinity, and in the beginning, all
of space and time was created through me. But I’m also just a humble carpenter
from a little village in first-century Palestine. So I guess it depends on how
you want to approach my story today. For instance, some people think that just
because I’m the Son of God, I would have been able to speak English. Seeing as
the English language wouldn’t exist for centuries after my earthly life, I
think that’s a pretty dubious claim. You could quiz me on Shakespeare, and I
wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Peter: But, Jesus, don’t you
pervade all things? Aren’t you speaking English with me right now?

Jesus: Yes, that’s a little
confusing, isn’t it? It’s one thing to approach me according to my humanity, as
Jesus of Nazareth. With my divinity—Jesus as Christ—you step right into a world
or metaphors, and it’s easy to lose your footing.

Peter: Well, then what should we
quiz you about?

Jesus: I have an idea. Why don’t you
quiz me on judgment?

Peter: Judgment?

Jesus: Yes, judgment. See, that’s
not really my job. I just said as much in today’s gospel reading, which was,
after all, a brief summary of my entire ministry, and which I cried aloud just
before the foot-washing and my arrest in the Kidron Valley.

Peter: Now, hang on a minute. You
say judgment is not your job? How can you say that? I mean, looking at John’s
gospel alone, you say in several places that judgment is the job that God the
Father has given you to carry out. And the Nicene Creed says you “will come
again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

Jesus: Well, yes, you’re right—good
biblical research, Peter! “Judge” is actually part of my ultimate job description.
But honestly, from day to day, it doesn’t match up with my actual duties. See,
if I went around describing myself as your “judge,” you’d hear it all wrong.
You’d imagine a guy in a big wig, sitting on a really high bench, hurling condemnations
from above about how naughty you’ve been. Frankly, that’s how most people see
me, even many of those who claim to have been following me all their lives.
It’s a real problem. They cheat on their diet and they imagine me wagging a
finger at them. They cheat on their spouse and they imagine that I’m stoking
the flames of hell—an existence I entered in order to destroy it, by the way.

Peter: Well then, what exactly is
the nature of your “judging”?

Jesus: You might want to notice,
for one thing, that the word in Greek is Krino, from which you get your English
word “crisis.” When you think of me as your judge, think of me as coming into
your life to force a crisis.

Peter: That doesn’t sound very
pleasant!

Jesus: Oh, no, it isn’t pleasant at
all. But ultimately, it’s extremely helpful. Remember that I know you far
better than you know yourself. Most of the time you walk around fooling
yourself into thinking you can live your life in some sort of balance between
the short-sighted, selfish actions that give you immediate gratification, and
the long-term, difficult work of love that makes you holy. But you can’t.
You’ll always fall off the beam one side or the other, and usually it’s the
first one. My job is to hold a mirror up to you and show you this fact.

Peter: So, no matter how much I try
to be a good person, I will always fail?

Jesus: Right. And if I can help you
see that, then something has to change.

Peter: But if I will always fail,
then how can I change? How can I ever achieve perfection?

Jesus: Well, first off, you can let
go of this perfection idea. When I said, “Be perfect,” I didn’t mean, “Be
flawless.” I meant, “Be whole.” Be content with yourself. Make friends with all
your character flaws and greet them when they show up; if you do this, you’ll
have them on a leash, by the way. It’s your flaws that make you loveable
anyway, not your star qualities. But my main point is this: Once you see
yourself as you really are, maybe that will change the way you treat others.
Maybe you’ll be more likely to love them. Because who’s really doing the
judging here? I’m just holding the mirror. If you hear my words and don’t keep
them, I don’t judge you for it, because I know you’re full of flaws. But if you
can accept those flaws and understand that I always see you as whole and not
broken—no matter what—well, my friend, that’s salvation right there. And
ultimately, that’s my job: salvation, not judgment.

Peter: So what about the Nicene
Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead”? And what
about another passage in John’s gospel: “[God] he has given him authority to
execute judgment”?

Jesus: Well, that’s a pretty deep
mystery there. I would invite you to let go of all your assumptions about it,
especially assumptions that include some sort of revenge against people who
have wronged you, or assumptions that give you some sort of privilege over
others just because you’ve been good. When I say it’s not my job to judge, I
mean that I don’t keep score along the way. How can you judge a life that’s
only half-lived? I let the weeds grow among the wheat, and if you don’t like
it, well, you’re not the farmer. Suffice it to say that all the judgments that
need to occur will occur in due time—or, really, outside of time, which God the
Father invented anyway. And judgment doesn’t necessarily mean condemnation. It
does mean accurate assessment for the purpose of growth. The point is for you
to get the focus off of yourself, and put it where it belongs: on others. You
do your job—loving God and loving other people—and I’ll do my job—saving all
the lost and broken. So, Peter … what’s the first question in the quiz?

Peter: Well, I was going to ask you
whether Hitler is burning in hell. That was supposed to be the lowball question
we give to our biggest celebrities so they have an easier time winning. But now
I’m not sure it’s my job to have a ready answer.

Jesus: Now you’re getting it! I may
not spend all my time judging, but you’re even less qualified than I am.

Peter: So much for our quiz.

Jesus: That’s OK, Peter—I suggest
we break format and break some bread together. And I see they’ve given you a
glass of water to keep by your microphone, but if you’ll take a sip now you’ll
find it’s actually a very nice Merlot. Welcome to the party!

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Every week when we pray the Nicene Creed, we claim that Jesus died
and was raised from the dead. To those of us who have spent our lives in the
church, it’s easy to forget how strange this sounds. People don’t really come
back from the dead, do they?

And yet the church has affirmed for nearly 2000 years that Jesus,
the teacher and healer from Galilee, died and was buried. He was truly dead,
dead, dead. His body was stiff and cold. And then somehow, sneakily,
mysteriously, the tomb became empty. And we have story after story at the end
of the gospels about Jesus appearing to his friends again, more alive, more
solid, more real than he had ever been before.

The Fairy Tale by Walther Firlefrom commons.wikimedia.org

What if it’s all just a fairy tale? What if these stories are just made
up in order to give us hope, an example to follow, a meaning to our lives? Well,
do people give their lives for fairy tales? Do they go to painful execution
singing nursery songs to a god they don’t believe in? The resurrection stories are
mysteriously elusive, and their details don’t agree with each other, and this
is, to me, what makes them so believable. If the apostles had been hucksters, at
least would have tried to get their stories straight. So what if a fairy tale
actually happened? Better yet, what if all the most resonant fairy tales point to
a deeper reality with resurrection at its core?

During the season of Easter, these fifty celebratory days, we work
out the ramifications of resurrection for the world and for us. We do this
liturgically by burning the Paschal candle at every Eucharist. We say
“alleluia” every chance we get. We eliminate the Confession of Sin during this
time to emphasize that we are swimming in Christ’s forgiveness; in the time of
Resurrection, there is no need to dwell on our sins.

We also explore resurrection through the stories we read from
Scripture this season. Two weeks ago we dealt with Thomas’s understandable
doubts and Jesus’ acceptance of him in spite of them. Last week we heard
Ananias come to believe that Saul, a persecutor of the Christians, could become
Paul, a great evangelist for Christ. This week we hear of a resuscitation, as
Peter raises the disciple Tabitha of Joppa from the dead. In the Revelation to
John, we hear of Christ not as a shepherd, but as a lamb, a lamb sacrificed to
secure the salvation of everyone, past, present, and future. And in the 23rd
psalm, which we just sang as a hymn, we hear the roots of the metaphor Jesus
employs in our gospel passage. Jesus describes himself as a shepherd who knows
each of his sheep by name and guides them so that no one can snatch them away
from him.

I see a common thread among all of these readings: an
acknowledgment that even in the face of God’s resurrection power, dark places
continue to exist. The evil forces of this world continue to operate, as if they
are in denial that they have lost the war. And we can certainly find grounds
for this denial all around us. People do continue to “walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,” to suffer and to die. Jesus’ resurrection did not
magically take away all the pain or establish an infinite utopia. So even
today, we are left to ask the question, “If there’s an all-powerful, all-loving
God, how can there still be so much evil in the world?” It’s just not fair.

Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do make a difference, but that
difference seems to be subtler than we’d like it to be. All that evil is still
in the world, but it occurs in the context of resurrection. Any gains that evil
seems to make are ultimately fruitless. God spreads an abundant feast before us
and fills our chalice full, even as our enemies press upon us from all sides. Those
who really, actually die are seen, in a much larger sense, to be eternally
alive. [Those whom we see robed in white have come through the great ordeal,
and God wipes away every tear from their eyes.] And in all this, at every step,
comes Jesus’ assurance: No one will snatch the sheep from the shepherd’s hand.
Jesus gives us eternal life, and we will never perish. It’s not just about
“heaven after we die.” It’s about life today taking place within this context
of resurrection. All the evil in the cosmos is subject to redemption, somehow,
some way, eternally.

This is so difficult for us to wrap our minds and hearts around.
Jesus tried to teach us, and he did so by telling his own fairy tales: parables,
stories of the Kingdom of God, of God’s grace, and of God’s loving judgment.
Resurrection means the lost sheep is found and restored to the flock.
Resurrection means the prodigal son is given a welcome-home party. Resurrection
means that a man beaten and left for dead is saved by his enemy. Resurrection
means a prophet emerges from three days in the belly of the fish to find his
own enemies repenting and forgiven.

As Jesus told his fairy tales, resurrection happened all around him
in real life, everywhere he went—as if to underscore his point—as if to blur the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Resurrection means that a rich man
repents of his greed and repays those he had exploited. Resurrection means that
a leper is healed, a demoniac is healed, a hemorrhaging woman is healed, and
blind man is healed, and all of them are restored to their communities.
Resurrection means that a hardened Roman centurion falls to his knees and
cries, “Surely this man was innocent!”

After Jesus’ ascension, resurrection continued. Resurrection means
a community of hope arising, simple fishermen becoming confident evangelists,
Gentiles welcomed into the fold, women and eunuchs welcomed as church leaders,
martyrs singing songs of praise even in the face of death as a means of
strengthening those who continued to live.

And so it continues throughout history, with the moments of
darkness and light so intertwined that often we can only tell in retrospect
where the moments of resurrection lay. The Roman Empire becomes Christian, and for
better or worse, it spreads the faith through governmental and military might.
But 1700 years later, we emerge from the assumption of a Christian society into
new, uncharted, exciting (and scary) territory. Resurrection means an end to slavery,
freedom emerging from oppression, an end to baseless discrimination, and new understandings
of what it means to respect the dignity of every human being. Resurrection will
continue to mean new things!

And here is where we find ourselves. In the 21st
century, we, too, experience resurrection as others have. We don’t have to rely
exclusively on ancient texts to assuage our doubts: our very lives can be the
evidence. What does this look like on the ground, as they say? What are some
clues that might help us notice resurrection in action?

Well, for one thing, resurrection is more easily seen in
retrospect. It might mean looking back on the darkest moments of your
life—moments when someone victimized you, for instance, or moments when you
acted shamefully—and trying to figure out how on earth things did get better. Sometimes
resurrection is forward-looking. It might mean imagining greater things than we
could before, or becoming braver than we used to be, for the sake of love.
Resurrection might mean a surprising sense of peace where before there was only
anxiety.

Maybe you can identify stories of resurrection in your own life, or
maybe doing so is difficult. But resurrection is sneaky. One thing I know for
sure is that it never looks like what we think it should look like, and it
never sets things back to the way they were before. It does not ignore or
minimize your pain; rather, it encompasses your pain and includes it and redeems
it and sets in within a larger context. Remember that Jesus’ resurrected body,
while it was physical and bore the wounds of his death, was also able to
materialize within a locked room! There is great mystery in resurrection. Sometimes
we have to expect to see it before we can. Sometimes we have to move beyond
Thomas’s mantra, “seeing is believing,” to understand that believing is seeing.

This is one thing the church is for: to help us place our lives
into the context of resurrection. (And how could we ever do this work alone?) Here
in the church, we share the unconventional idea that God loves everyone eternally,
even our enemies, even God’s adversaries. Here in the church, we find that whenever
we follow some shepherd other than Jesus—that is, when we act in ways that run
counter to love and forgiveness—the Good Shepherd is still searching for us and
calling us back home. And ultimately, here in the church, we learn that love
wins. We learn that if our situation is not OK, that only means it’s not over
yet.

During this season of Easter, listen for the shepherd’s voice and
follow. Watch for evidence of resurrection. Know that you have been given
eternal life, and that no one can possibly snatch you out of the shepherd’s
hand. The Good Shepherd calls you “greater than all else.” God considers the
fact of you to be more important than your moral or immoral behavior, more
important than your successes or failures, more important than your wisdom or
foolishness, more important than what you can and cannot do, more important than
anything people wish you would become, more important than anything else in the
universe. You are the end, not the means, and that is why God loves you. You
simply are, and that means that you live in a world defined by resurrection.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, through whose resurrection
we all share eternal life. May we always be ready to embrace the fairy tale that
came true—that Jesus died and was raised from the dead—so that we can enjoy the
fruits of resurrection in this life and beyond it. Amen.

Today is the feast day of two African-American bishops, one born
free and one born into slavery, both important figures in the Episcopal Church
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Edward Thomas Demby was born in Delaware in 1869 to two
freeborn parents. He grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (which
we typically abbreviate as the AME Church), attended Howard University, and was
ordained. It was during his time serving as Dean of Students at Paul Quinn
College in Texas that Demby was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and was soon
after ordained to the Episcopal priesthood.

Serving in several congregations throughout the South and
then being appointed Archdeacon for Colored Work in Tennessee, Demby wrote that
working in that environment was like “building bricks without straw.” He worked
for the full inclusion of African-Americans in the Episcopal Church, always
swimming against the tide of Jim Crow. For many years he worked for no salary
at all, but nevertheless he founded a number of black hospitals, schools, and
orphanages.

Demby became bishop suffragan of the Diocese of Arkansas—the
first African-American to serve as a bishop in the United States. (A bishop
suffragan is an assisting bishop elected to do specific work throughout a
diocese.) Demby served in many groups both inside and outside the church,
including the Forward Movement Commission, the Joint Commission on Negro Work,
the Race Relations Commission, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the
American Association of the Advancement of Colored People, the American League
for a Free Palestine, the American Humane Society, and the Sociology Society.
He became the primary voice for the desegregation of the Episcopal Church and
wrote many books and articles. At the age of 85, just a few years before his
death, Demby was able to witness the landmark decision on Brown v. Board of
Education.

Henry Beard Delany, on the other hand, was born into slavery
in Georgia just a few years before the Civil War began. Initially trained by
his father as a farmer, carpenter, and brick mason, in his early 20s Delany became
the recipient of a scholarship funded by his congregation, St. Peter’s
Episcopal Church in Fernandina Beach, Florida. He attended St. Augustine’s
College in Raleigh, North Carolina, a school founded by the Episcopal Church
immediately after the Civil War specifically to educate newly freed people.
Delany studied music and theology, and after graduating, he stayed at St.
Augustine’s to teach carpentry and masonry. He became the architect and chief builder
of the school’s historic chapel. He also worked with students to build both a
library and a hospital on campus.

During his time in Raleigh, Delany joined St. Ambrose
Episcopal Church, and from there he was ordained to the priesthood in 1892. He
was elected bishop suffragan in North Carolina, specifically for what the
church then called Negro Work, in the same year that Demby was elected. Delany traveled
throughout the Carolinas establishing black Episcopal congregations, since Jim
Crow laws prevented any possibility of integrated churches in the South.

I personally can’t imagine living such an accomplished life
as these two men did. Yet before this week, I had never heard of Demby or
Delany. To be fair, our church has a long history, and there are many wonderful
bishops I’ve never heard of. But it struck me that the work of
African-Americans, especially, tends to be relatively unknown among us white
folks. Growing up in small-town white America in the 1980s, my history books
mentioned Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and no other stars of the civil
rights movement. Growing up in small-town white Episcopal churches, I never
heard the names of any black Episcopalians.

This basic ignorance of important pieces of American history
is just part of our landscape, a continuing, unthinking contribution to a world
that needs African-Americans to preach the gospel “in spite of great
opposition.” The two men we honor today, like the Apostle Paul and his
companions, “worked night and day” to proclaim the gospel of God, urging and
encouraging and pleading that we white folks should lead lives worthy of God.
We’ve come a long way, yes. But our ignorance indicates that we can go so much
farther.

You know, sometimes you’ll hear people scorn other people for
their ignorance—for not knowing something that they think everybody should
know. I try never to do this, understanding that we all learn things when we
learn them, and that none of us has the time or energy even to learn everything
that would be helpful even to ourselves, let alone to others. So today, I’m glad
to have learned about Edward Thomas Demby and Henry Beard Delany. In
researching them, I googled some of the churches where they served so faithfully.I learned that one of my seminary classmates,
Joyce Cunningham, serves as assisting clergy at St. Ambrose Church in Raleigh,
the congregation that sponsored Henry Delany for ordination. This and many
other historically black congregations in the Episcopal Church are the work of
these two men and many other people.

I thank God for Demby and Delany’s legacies. They remind me
that to know my own history is good, but that anything I can learn about
another people’s history makes me a better person. Not only that, but doing so
shows me that other people’s history is, in a very real way, my history as well—in
this case, American history and Episcopal history. Finally, such learning helps
fit me for God’s Kingdom: a kingdom of justice and equity, a kingdom that is alive
in the world wherever the powerful choose to abdicate that power to others, and
that is active in the world wherever people of every color, all beloved of God,
love one another. Amen.